Baby Driver review

UK filmmaker Edgar Wright has made a name for himself for being able to both satirize and stylistically capture the appeal of whatever genre he’s sending up. “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End” are meant to be entertaining through the use of irony and sarcasm, but when they full-tilt into the world of car-chases, shoot-outs, and robot/zombie attacks, it’s clear that Wright’s love for these genres is not ironic and he would like his posters hanging right next the George Romero and Jon Woo one-sheets, stapled on the walls of a 38 year old’s basement wood paneling.

Wright’s latest film “Baby Driver” sees the director putting his guard down a little by truly throwing himself in the deep end of action-movie waters, without his usual satire and comedy as a flotation device. Where his quick editing and source-music soundtrack selections were once used to enhance a scene’s comedic potential, it is now finely tuned to inform the movie’s intentionally detached style.

Ansel Elgort plays the titular Baby, a young driver who works as a getaway man for a powerful criminal ringleader named Doc (Kevin Spacey). After settling some debt with the crime boss, he is roped into working on one last job before he can drive to the west coast with his new sweetheart Debora (Lilly James.) Baby is forced to work with a Bonny and Clyde couple named Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez) and a loose cannon named Bats (Jamie Foxx). Of course, when plans are thrown out of whack, Baby has to think as quickly as he can drive and maneuver on the road.

The main stylistic theme set in motion from the first scene is Baby’s relationship to the film’s music. The movie is often scored by the music that the character is listening to within each scene as it is unfolding in real time. Here Wright seems to be employing his ironic distance to bring attention to the artifice of filmmaking itself, having the main character enacting his daily life like a director behind the wheel of his own movie. Baby is also an archivist of sorts, as he secretly records every conversation he has and later remixes parts of the raw audio to make danceable midi mix-tapes.

At every turn Wright draws attention to the movie’s movie-ness and, in turn, draws attention to himself as the movie’s stylistic architect.  More so than ever, this director wants to stand alongside this picture as a work of personal gratification. And yet, while it may be the project closest to his ego, dramatically speaking, its show-off quality and its lack of comedic framing renders the film an impressive but somewhat shallow middle-school science fare diorama, in which our eyes dart back and forth to follow the marble as it rattles through the device with precision.

Wright has studied the greats, and “Baby Driver” evokes the bright-eyed zip and tight choreography of the musicals of the 60s, such as “West Side Story,” as well as the work of mentor Quentin Tarantino (particularly, “Reservoir Dogs” and “True Romance”) and the work of Walter Hill (particularly, “The Driver” and the cult crime-musical “Streets of Fire”), but Elgort’s soft, near-wordless performance along with the economically written but stock nature of the screenplay creates for an movie that functions like an entertaining playlist of other movies.  

There’s absolutely a lot of fun to be had in cool-for-cool’s-sake nature of this picture and I don’t begrudge anyone who responds positively to this movie’s tightly considered mechanics. Both Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm turn in stellar scene-chewing performances and this is an achievement in cinematic aesthetics that works as a great popcorn companion. But while the film was perfectly likable I was never unaware of how desperately it wanted to be liked.   

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Baby Driver."

Horrible Bosses 2 review

         After the surprise success of “The Hangover,” Hollywood hastily responded with a few high-concept, men-behaving-badly comedies to cash in on the trend. 2011’s “Horrible Bosses,” while not a laugh-a- minute classic by any means, was one of the better copycats.  Though the plot was merely serviceable,  it was at least highlighted by a few uncharacteristic performances from the likes of Kevin Spacey doing his gleefully-mean “Swimming with Sharks” thing, a bald and bug-eyed Colin Farrell, enjoying a break from being the heartthrob, and Jennifer Aniston being completely and unapologetically filthy. The film also reminded us of the comedic prowess of Jamie Foxx, who, after his Oscar success, was scrambling to find his footing again (and has yet to stabilize), and it successfully introduced Charlie Day, of FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” to the big screen.

           “Horrible Bosses 2,” however, continues to prove that comedy sequels usually can’t deliver the oftentimes incalculable chemistry of the first, which isn’t to say that the proceeding film--a little sitcom-ish and sloppy in its execution--was all that effective or original to begin with.  Here, the leading trio of Jason Bateman as the straight-man, Jason Sudeikis as the Vince Vaughn-esque, man-child player, and Charlie Day as the expressive over-reactor, never perform as naturally or as effortlessly as did the first time. Instead, their interactions appear forced and tired, the screenplay is thoughtlessly slapped together, and the movie’s exertion to stimulate laughs becomes increasingly unfunny as the plot lumbers from incident to incident.

           This time around the boys try to make it as their own bosses, creating and mass-marketing a Sky-Mall ready bathroom device called the Shower Buddy.  After accepting a shady deal with a larger cooperation to help fund and sell their product, new boss Bert Hansen (Christoph Waltz) and his petulant son Rex (Chris Pine) steal most of the profit for themselves, as well as the rights to their invention. This then, or course, leads the three dim-wits to go back to their criminal scheming, as they try to enact a complicated and illogical plan to fake the kidnapping of Bert Hansen’s son, using the ransom to buy back their company.

          With our leads now visibly bored and ineffectually improving their way through the entire film, the movie’s comedic success is thrust upon the efforts of the supporting cast, but the screenplay’s 1+?=comedy approach gives none of these actors anything substantial or funny to work with. Barely in the movie, Waltz is totally wasted and serves as nothing but a tedious mechanism for the majority of the film. Aniston returns as the nympho-dentist but is now stripped from the comedic place of power and irony that made her performance in the first film vaguely clever and is instead reduced to the butt of a sexist, male fantasy joke.  Jamie Foxx is clearly still having fun playing the criminal with a heart of gold but he too is chained to a messy script that gives his character a lack of believable motivation.  Chris Pine ends up with the best lines in the movie and the funniest stuff to do here but as game as he is, even he can’t keep this boat from sinking.

          Nobody asked for a “Horrible Bosses 2”, really, so nobody should be surprised that it basically sucks. Evenly-lit and comprised of mostly mid-shots and close-ups, the movie lacks just as much ambition visually as it does narratively. And neither of these problems would be particularly damning if the film could at least deliver the laughs, but, minus Chris Pine doing some entertaining sleaze and a too-little-late gag involving a chain-link fence, sadly, it does not.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2014

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review

                 Expectations of Marc Webb’s sequel to Sony’s successful 2012 Spider-Man reboot was  perhaps insurmountable. For some, the first film that was released only five years after Sam Raimi’s generation defining trilogy, satisfied what people wanted to see with the continuation of this superhero staple. For others (including this reviewer) despite having a terrific cast, the film lacked a unique point of view and the obvious rush to re-launch the series made for a somewhat competent but mostly tepid rehash of over-cooked Spidey-lore.

                You might think that now that the pesky origin story has been tediously reestablished, this anticipated sequel would be allowed the narrative freedom to further explore Webb's new interpretation of this timeless character and the cinematic universe he inhabits. But what we end up getting with this installment is a manic tangle of incongruent plot threads fighting for screen-time in an overlong, over-stylized disaster of a movie that's been marred by invasive studio-notes.  

                This movie has about six different movies going on at any one time, but most prominently we follow Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he's reeling from guilt by ignoring the dying wishes of his girlfriend’s father, and continuing to put Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in harm’s way simply by dating her.  This then leads him to break things off with her to further his personal investigation surrounding his father’s mysterious death. The unfinished genetic research that surrounded this mystery is now being exploited by Oscorp’s new CEO, Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan). Harry plans to use the radiated spider venom to treat his body against the same genetic disease that killed Norman.  Unbenounced to Harry or Peter, or Gwen who still works for the secretive lab, the company has an insidious strategy behind this new science.

                You might think that’s enough story for one movie, but wait, there’s more! An awkwardly pitched Jamie Foxx plays a geeky disgruntled lab-tech with an unhealthy obsession towards Spider-Man. After an unfortunate accident at Plotcorp--I mean Oscorp—which apparently has an alarming track record of unsettling accidents involving staff, visitors and its proprietors, Foxx is then transformed into a translucent energy being called Electro. Can Spider-Man defeat him, while keeping Gwen from moving to London? Will she give up her dreams of becoming a super-scholar at Oxford and continue to put herself in danger in New York?  In only five minutes can Peter convince the audience that he and Harry have a believable, preexisting best-friend relationship? Can director Marc Webb figure out a way to make anyone still care about anything dealing with Peter's stupid dead father?  Can Spider-Man save danger-addicted children from Paul Giamatti as he marches the streets in giant, Rhino-shaped mech-suit? Wait, the Rhino’s in this movie too!? *Sigh*

                Despite a half-way decent love story between the real-life couple of Garfield and Stone, the rest of the movie is an over-crowded step latter where scenes seem to only exist to set up other scenes--half of which can’t even be resolved until the next sequel. Tonally, the movie oscillates between post-Twilight angst, superhero action movie spectacle, and campy Saturday morning silliness that clangs against the film’s more somber moments of sincerity. 

                “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is without a doubt an undisciplined, compromised affair, and the story suffers greatly from Sony’s desperation to catch up with the long-form world-building of Disney’s Marvel-Universe epics, but when Webb is able to slow the action down enough to let his characters actually breath, they momentarily expose a beating heart underneath all of the movie’s overbearing aesthetics and the screenplay’s stifling mechanics.

 Grade: C-

Originally published by Idaho State Journal/May-2014